The Well Known Crooked Biden OF YESTERYEAR!

January 26, 2021

Biden’s False Catholicism

By T.R. Clancy AT AMERICAN THINKER a couple of years ago!

The head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has publicly reminded the new President Biden that policies he’s pledged to “in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, gender ‘would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity.’” 

Of course this was too much for Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich, who angrily complained that the USCCB dared to issue this “ill-considered statement on the day of President Biden’s inauguration.”  The cardinal has been a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, and no doubt thinks that attention on Biden’s lapsed moral positions should be off limits no matter what day it is.  On the excuse that the statement hadn’t first been vetted in committee (where it would certainly have been quashed), the Cupich holds the conference guilty of  “internal institutional failures.”  But his real objection to releasing the statement was “that there is seemingly no precedent for doing so, the statement, critical of President Biden, came as a surprise to many bishops, who received it just hours before it was released. ‘ 

If the USCCB’s statement is both unprecedented and critical, it might be because Biden is only the second Catholic elected president, and his Catholic predecessor, even giving full demerits for JFK’s midnight skinny-dipping with Fiddle and Faddle, was not making frequent, public, and cranky assurances to voters that, once elected, he intended to pursue the most hostile anti-Catholic agenda in American history.  Just as Biden dared black voters not to support him at the risk of their racial identity, Biden dared Catholic voters not to elect him despite his obvious qualifications of personal religiosity and chumminess with the Pope.  At the same time his campaign was protecting Biden from chancing specifics about his policy positions, there was a steady stream of video shots of Biden wryly crossing himself, and irreligious news outlets publishing smarmy profiles taking reverent note of the ever-present rosary in Biden’s pocket and his weekly attendance at Mass.  At the first White House briefing on the evening of the inauguration, press secretary Jen Psaki batted away a legitimate question about Biden’s promise to restore federal funding for abortion with, “’I will take the opportunity to remind all of you that he is a devout Catholic.’” 

But that’s the point: has anyone taken the opportunity to remind Joe Biden about being a devout Catholic?  Archbishop Gomez’s statement may have been his attempt to do that.  

The archbishop’s full statement, in fact, is still the mildest of reminders, watered down as it is with lots of inoffensive blarney.  For instance, it begins with a suitably polite assurance of prayers for “wisdom and courage” for the new president, and an avowal that the Church remains nonpartisan.  Then follows an unfounded reference to “Mr. Biden’s piety,” irksome to observant Catholics because it’s the impiety of Biden’s dedication to things, like enshrining child murder in law, that made an unprecedented statement necessary.  Archbishop Gomez’s declaration concerning Biden’s promised agenda on abortion and gender is commendably unequivocal in itself, but should have been backed up with a demand, respectful but resolute, that obedience to the faith requires him to abandon those policies. 

And why not make the demand?  It’s not unusual that interested institutions make demands on officeholders, especially when they entail fundamental principles.  Black Lives Matter, whose standing is premised on nothing but thoroughly disproven lies, was making demands on Biden as soon as the election was over.  On the other hand, Catholics (like Joe Biden) profess to believe that what the Church teaches was revealed by God Himself.  Why wouldn’t the Church demand Biden’s public adherence to the faith he’s spent a lifetime publicly exploiting? 

In the end there’s no use hoping for “dialogue” with the likes of Catholics like Biden and the arch-hypocrite, Nancy Pelosi.  They’re past dialogue.  For years Pelosi’s contempt for Catholic teaching on abortion has earned her personal warnings by the shepherds of the Church, including her own archbishop and the Pope himself.  Her response was insolence: She knows “’more about having babies than the pope,’” and pro-life Catholics  are “dumb” and “selling out democracy.”  Biden’s arrogation of the celestial station of healer of the nation’s soul is borderline sacrilege.  Only a person whose own soul is in shambles could, without a particle of self-awareness, gush over the nuns who taught him his religion as a child, “those lovely women,” and at the same time vow to wage unconditional war on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The mildness of Archbishop Gomez’s statement may be explained by the reluctance of today’s bishops to sound dogmatic.  The archbishop may not have noticed how the Left has just recently learned how to proclaim their own most cherished and most destructive positions — on climate change, on transgenderism, on white supremacy — as unquestionable, absolute truths, after eons denying that absolute truths even exist.  The dogmatic approach empowers them to enforce acceptance of the received truths by punishing heretics who refuse to profess them and declaring anathema any belief that contradicts them. 

Except the Left is dogmatic and wrong, while the Church is dogmatic and right.  And nothing less than the truth — stated unequivocally, dogmatically — will be strong enough to purify an atmosphere so toxic with lies as the one Biden and Pelosi have been inhaling and exhaling most of their lives.  It’s too late for dialogue.  More important, for Biden and Pelosi, who are both visibly declining on the outside and the inside, it could soon be too late for repentance.  For the sake of their souls, they deserve better from the Church than wishes for dialogue.  We all do.

T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan.  You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.

BIDEN: “More than half the women in my administration are women.”

February 5, 2023

Balloons and Hot Air

By Clarice Feldman at American Thinker:

There are sites which regularly publish President Biden’s verbal gaffes. When he’s not hiding in his basement these perilous days, those gaffes are one of the few things you can reliably count on. 

Townhall.com published one Biden flub this week that is among my favorites. 

BIDEN: “More than half the women in my administration are women.”

If you doubt the accuracy of this there’s a video they’ve published which captured it.

Now that I think of it, given the way that Biden staffed his administration, perhaps this wasn’t a gaffe, but a rare moment of honesty from someone so consistently dissembling over many years that he makes Congressman George Santos look like an amateur. 

In a break from the focus on Russia and Ukraine this week,

What’s going on here? I think Larry is absolutely right: The Chinese, having had to put up with continual US political, military, and intel gathering provocations for years are now yanking our chain:

The heart of the issue is that the Chinese balloon does not pose a greater security threat to the United States than a Chinese military satellite. What has so many arm chair generals and pundits pissed off is that the Chinese are ridiculing our impotence. Nancy Pelosi goes to Taiwan as a deliberate insult to China and the Chinese now send us a balloon and daring us to shoot it down. That is a bait the U.S. should not take. 

I certainly have no idea whether or not this is a dangerous move by China or how we should respond, though my friends Stephen and Shoshanna Bryen, with a lifetime of experience in such matters, think it exposes a massive vulnerability.

First, they expose as unpersuasive the military defense for doing nothing:

To the claim that the balloon was operating far above commercial airspace they remind us that we learned about it only because it was spotted and photographed by a passenger on a commercial plane. To the claim that shooting it down would create debris that might injure civilians on the ground, the Bryens note it was spotted over very sparsely populated Montana. No purchase in their thinking for the assertion that the balloon provides China with no more than it would get from surveillance satellites either: such balloons could easily be carrying EMPs. (Electromagnetic Pulse which would destroy the electronics and digital circuitry over an area of hundreds of miles, thereby denying electric power to our homes, businesses, and military.).

The surveillance operation, they argue, could as well have been a test of our air defense system.

China has exposed a massive security vulnerability over US territory, and whether that vulnerability is military or political or both, the American people deserve better answers. 

Another Chinese surveillance balloon has been spotted over Latin America.  The seems to put paid to the Chinese excuse that this was just a weather balloon that went astray — unless you believe more than one just got away in a country which seems to keep close watch on everything and everyone in it.

When in doubt, you’ll find that the satire site Babylon Bee often is ahead of the game. It first announced that Biden would shoot it down as soon as it was finished spying, and more recently reports Biden claimed that the balloon outgunned us and that we surrendered to it. 

We’ve already good reason to doubt the honesty and ability of our intelligence agencies, and no one in his right mind credits anything Biden says. In its attempted coverup of the incursion and its lame excuses for doing nothing, the military would join the institutions which deserve to lose our trust. Thankfully, they got the message that they were not believed, and finally acted on Saturday when (as the Bee predicted) they shot down the balloon over the Atlantic.

re was a claim that it exploded over Montana, but that claim seems to have been credibly debunked.

The military claims it cannot do anything about it, that the balloon currently does not pose a “military or political” threat. They’ve also contended that in their assessment shooting it down could create debris that might hurt people on the ground.

The Chinese claim it’s a weather (meteorology balloon) that strayed into our territory.  That seems unlikely, so you can expect there’s a great deal of speculation about its purpose. Is it to taunt us? Humiliate our demented president and his administration? Is it a trial run for something worse?

Was our intelligence lacking and permitted the overflight? The NY Post says it wasn’t, that we knew about it for a week before it was spotted by civilians and tried to hide it so the overflight would not interfere with Secretary Antony Blinken’s’ planned trip to China. If that was the intention, it failed, and the trip, after all, was cancelled once the administration’s plan to keep it secret failed.

Some have contended that the balloon did not clearly violate our airspace. After quoting Larry Johnson, Mark Wauck says all the fuss is just Sturm and Drang, because there’s nothing illegal about the balloon’s traversing the USA.  

The basic idea is that countries with military related satellites — which also includes intelligence gathering — have agreed not to interfere with satellites in “outer space”. At least not during peace times. The agreement isn’t written in stone, and there is nothing in international law defining “where earth’s atmosphere ends and space begins.” The 60-mile limit is a “de facto assumption,” not a legal definition, and rests on common sense ideas, but includes some grey areas, which Larry explains. 

The Chinese balloon is traversing the US at an altitude of 55 miles.

What’s going on here? I think Larry is absolutely right: The Chinese, having had to put up with continual US political, military, and intel gathering provocations for years are now yanking our chain:

The heart of the issue is that the Chinese balloon does not pose a greater security threat to the United States than a Chinese military satellite. What has so many arm chair generals and pundits pissed off is that the Chinese are ridiculing our impotence. Nancy Pelosi goes to Taiwan as a deliberate insult to China and the Chinese now send us a balloon and daring us to shoot it down. That is a bait the U.S. should not take. 

I certainly have no idea whether or not this is a dangerous move by China or how we should respond, though my friends Stephen and Shoshanna Bryen, with a lifetime of experience in such matters, think it exposes a massive vulnerability.

First, they expose as unpersuasive the military defense for doing nothing:

To the claim that the balloon was operating far above commercial airspace they remind us that we learned about it only because it was spotted and photographed by a passenger on a commercial plane. To the claim that shooting it down would create debris that might injure civilians on the ground, the Bryens note it was spotted over very sparsely populated Montana. No purchase in their thinking for the assertion that the balloon provides China with no more than it would get from surveillance satellites either: such balloons could easily be carrying EMPs. (Electromagnetic Pulse which would destroy the electronics and digital circuitry over an area of hundreds of miles, thereby denying electric power to our homes, businesses, and military.).

The surveillance operation, they argue, could as well have been a test of our air defense system.

China has exposed a massive security vulnerability over US territory, and whether that vulnerability is military or political or both, the American people deserve better answers. 

Another Chinese surveillance balloon has been spotted over Latin America.  The seems to put paid to the Chinese excuse that this was just a weather balloon that went astray — unless you believe more than one just got away in a country which seems to keep close watch on everything and everyone in it.

When in doubt, you’ll find that the satire site Babylon Bee often is ahead of the game. It first announced that Biden would shoot it down as soon as it was finished spying, and more recently reports Biden claimed that the balloon outgunned us and that we surrendered to it. 

We’ve already good reason to doubt the honesty and ability of our intelligence agencies, and no one in his right mind credits anything Biden says. In its attempted coverup of the incursion and its lame excuses for doing nothing, the military would join the institutions which deserve to lose our trust. Thankfully, they got the message that they were not believed, and finally acted on Saturday when (as the Bee predicted) they shot down the balloon over the Atlantic.

The Art Of A Balloon In Biden Country!

 FEBRUARY 5, 2023 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN LOOSE ENDS at Power Line:

LOOSE ENDS (205) & MORE BALLOON MEMES

• Bill Kristol, a superspreader of Trump Derangement Syndrome, long ago demonstrated that one of the side effects of the TDS virus is losing your wit, but it appears the next symptom is losing your mind:

Meanwhile, this guy has the right idea:

• Speaking of humorless liberal scolds, Three Whisky Happy Hour podcast intends to lodge a protest at this gross slander—right after we refill our custom-engraved whisky glasses:

• Maybe China is just sending a hint that some time soon they might demand a balloon payment on all the U.S. debt they hold? And is this possibly the first time an American pilot has shot down an enemy balloon since World War I?

In any case, let’s keep having fun with this, since the pics will be stale by TWiP time next Saturday:

Will Our Dem Fascists Owning Minnesota Come To Reek Like California?

FEBRUARY 4, 2023 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

THE GREAT SORT CONTINUES

Americans are sorting themselves into red and blue states. To be fair, though, the sort is mostly a one-way street: millions are leaving failing blue states and flocking to Florida, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, etc.

As this realignment of population continues, states seem to be doubling down. California and New York edge farther to the left, while in Minnesota, my state, Democrats are proposing to increase personal income taxes to the second highest rate in the nation, thus driving the state further into irrelevance. But that is a minority trend. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Statehouses across the country are continuing to cut taxes in a movement that shows no sign of slowing down. By year-end, nearly half of all states will have cut their income-tax rates within a three-year period. The good results so far confirm that we’re in a virtuous economic-political cycle.

At least six states have kicked off their 2023 legislative sessions with income-tax cut proposals. Newly inaugurated Governors in Arkansas and Nebraska campaigned on rate cuts and are asking legislators to follow through. Leaders in Virginia and Montana want to cut rates modestly with bipartisan support. Large GOP majorities in West Virginia and Utah are considering significant cuts after hesitating last year.

Each of these states has at least one neighbor where tax rates have dropped recently, and competition is sustaining the trend.

Many conservatives have worried that red states’ success could be their undoing. Maybe the New Yorkers and Californians streaming into Florida and Texas will bring blue politics with them. But that doesn’t seem to be happening:

“We’re trying to run up that score in voter registration,” [Christian Ziegler, vice chair of the Republican Party of Florida] said, explaining that there were 250,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida when DeSantis first took office in 2018.

Now, there are more than 300,000 more Republicans than Democrats in Florida.

“So we’ve had this massive swing,” he said.

Ziegler provided another stunning data point, noting that one million net new people have moved to the state and registered to vote since DeSantis first took office.

“Out of a million, about half a million have registered as Republican, and only 17,000 have registered as Democrats. So we’re just obliterating the Democrats,” he said.

“I did not believe it. I had to go back and redo the numbers because I just couldn’t believe it, but it ends up being true,” he added.

If the Great Sort continues, and America comes to consist mostly of hard-core red and blue states, with a diminishing number of purple battlegrounds, the possibility of disunion will become real. As I have said many times, the alternative to disunion is a rebirth of federalism. The days when New York and California could dictate policy to Texas and Florida (and many other states) are gone. If the blue states want to drive off a cliff, we may not be able to stop them. But the rest of us are not going along for the ride.

Handel’s Beautiful Messiah